The Lucid Builder is a powerful software product that allows you to quickly and easily construct multimedia identification keys on any topic you choose.

The builder comes with an easy to follow tutorial to help you pick up the basics of constructing keys using Lucid3 quickly and easily.

When you open the Lucid3 Builder you will see three panels, titled Properties, Features and Entities. The Features and Entities panels hold the feature (character) and entity (e.g. taxon) trees to be used in the key. The Properties panel is used to set various properties for items in the other panels.

The basic elements of a Lucid3 key consist of -

a list of entities,

a list of features and states that may be used to describe those entities,

a matrix of score data for the features associated with each of the entities and

various image and HTML attachments ( images, web pages etc) for the entities and features, to provide extra information to users.

The Lucid3 Builder provides all the tools necessary to create the entity and feature lists, encode the score data, and attach information files to items.